A touch of destruction in the garden

Well this is not good. I was going to write ‘this sucks’, but really. I have been using stronger words than that this week.

Walking around the destruction muttering dark, dark swear words under my breath.

We get snow. We have cold snaps.

What we don’t often get are massive snowfalls while all the leaves are still in leaf. The whole of our region has been blasted with a climate chaos event that had all the power out, the internet down, trees bringing down telephone wires, you name it was a mess. Our power went out on Thursday night and bits came back on Saturday.

Some villages round our way didn’t get reconnected until Sunday night.

I’ll spare you the story of the enforced defrosting and cleaning of fridges and deep freezers and concentrate on the outdoor carnage.

The beautiful oak up on the oak bank (yes, I’m nothing if not original) has lost so many limbs I don’t know how I’m going to prune it back to shape.

The two plum trees in front of the house near the permaculture beds? They are gone. Too many branches off to save them.

This is a shot of them on the first day. But then more snow fell and I can’t believe the sound of all the branches cracking didn’t wake me up.

Well, I never was a fan. I didn’t plant them. They are just sucker factories and create no end of work for me. But they are going to have to come down . And change the view utterly.

Here they are on Sunday morning when the snow finally started to melt.

The only good job they did was to distract you from the power line leading to the house. I’ll have to improve my photoshop skills in future to hide the eyesore from the garden pics.

The potager is fine. Of course. A think blanket of snow works wonders in the vegetable garden.

It’s the evergreen plants that cop it.

I spent most of Friday whacking branches with a broom. And getting soaked and cold for my trouble.

At least I got most of the oak branches off the power line leading to the house on the lower terraces. I broke a long handled pool broom doing that fun job. And had to come in an change clothes. Twice.

The horses had fun following my progress round the hedges. And luckily they don’t speak human so couldn’t hear me cussing and hissing and generally being grumpy about this latest turn of events.

Ho hum. To the loppers and chain saw I go.